Experimental Work in Presupposition and Presupposition Projection

Recent years have seen a surge of experimental approaches to the study of natural language meaning, both to get solid data on subtle phenomena hard to assess through introspection, and to understand how abstract characterizations of linguistic knowledge relate to real-time cognitive processes in language comprehension. The present paper reviews work in one of the most recent areas to see extensive experimental investigations, namely presupposition and presupposition projection. Presuppositions are at the very nexus of linguistically encoded content and contextual information, as they relate directly to the discourse context but also interact in intricate ways with their intra-sentential linguistic environment. They are thus extremely suitable for investigating the interplay of linguistic and more domain general processes in language comprehension, as well as for experimental investigations of subtle theoretical phenomena.